• Right-wing culture-war radio host Janet Mefferd is not pleased to hear Southern Baptist leaders acknowledge that you can’t pray away the gay. They’re “playing right into the hands of Big Gay, which is on a totalitarian course to rub out personal autonomy.”
Well, at least playing right into the hands of Big Gay as it rubs one out is a bit less vivid than the usual “shove it down our throats” imagery of the right wing. But still.
Four years later, I’m still chewing on Coates’ challenge to “assume the garb of the thespian.” Cast yourself in their role. But remember that the key to playing the villain is not to think of yourself as playing The Villain.
• I’ve seen a lot of horrifically, despicably ignorant stuff written around — and allegedly about — the death of Brittany Maynard. This woman had glioblastoma multiforme, which kills you. Always and quickly and unpleasantly. It is not “a brain tumor.” It is a relentless series of tumors gradually and inexorably shutting down pieces of your brain, your mind, your cognition, bodily function, perception and personality. No heroic medical team or faith healer or herbalist has ever stopped it or even slowed it down appreciably. This is a disease that killed Tug McGraw — Mr. “You Gotta Believe” himself — as surely and swiftly as it killed everyone else who’s ever had it.
I’ve seen it up close, twice. It is not abstract. Neither was Ms. Maynard. So if you’re looking for some abstract case study onto which to project your irrelevant pious abstractions, please kindly find some elsewhere in which to stick them.
P.S. Thank you, Ben Corey.
• Some good news from here in Pennsylvania: One less (alleged) anti-government crazed white homicidal maniac running around in the woods. Still waiting for moderate white leaders to step up and condemn Frein’s violent extremism.
It seems likely that this (alleged) paranoid anti-government, anti-American cop-killer will spend the rest of his days in prison where, as an (alleged) felon, he won’t have the right to vote. But that shouldn’t bother Eric Frein too much, seeing as the old white people who actually do vote in midterm elections just voted for all the people his ideology supports anyway.
• This week in The Journal of NSS Research: “At least to some degree, the Tea Party movement is an outlet for mobilizing and expressing racialized grievances which have been symbolically magnified by the election of the nation’s first black president.” (No [surprise], Sherlock.)
Related: Can’t we all just get along?
• Within a few hours of publishing a post about American reluctance to consider the bidet (as an analogy for other things) I received a very friendly email from the nice folks at Bidet.org. They seem to have an effervescent enthusiasm for their products — see, for example, their “Benefits of Using a Bidet” page. I don’t know anything more about them than this, but I would guess — based on their remarkable rapid-response media outreach — that their customer service is probably equally impressive.
• Evangelical and/or post-evangelical readers who are old enough to remember the “CCM” of the 1980s and 1990s may have noticed that the titling of these link-roundup posts recently shifted. For months, I took the titles for these from the lyrics of Daniel Amos songs because: A) Daniel Amos was and is a terrific band whose music has played a role in my spiritual formation; B) it’s a way of thumbing my nose at the annoying practice of SEO click-chasing; and C) I didn’t know what else to do about titling these posts.
Anyway, I finished working through every Daniel Amos album from Horrendous Disc (1981) through Songs of the Heart (1995) and so I’ve now moved on to another old CCM fave — Mr. Steve Taylor. Listening to old Steve now is like revisiting a lost world in that neither he nor I are still as fully (if uncomfortably) ensconced in the white evangelical subculture as we were back then. But still, for a kid in a fundie church youth group in the 1980s, this was a revelation, a glimpse of a restless irreverence that longed for something more:
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